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Tuesday, January 13, 2015

You know the feeling – the
floaty one, in which the words want to land on the page faster than your
fingers can move. You forget your surroundings. When you come back to earth, you
find you have a decent first draft that you can somewhat effortlessly refine
until you have a piece that impresses your readers and even yourself. It
doesn’t happen often enough for me, or I’m guessing for any writer, that experience
we call flow.

I used to be pretty good at finding
flow. In college, I’d settle on the floor by my dorm-room bed with a
half-gallon of grape Gatorade by my side and the Talking Heads’ greatest hits cassette
playing on my boom box. Since my roommate was a lab-bound engineering major, I
always had a few uninterrupted hours to sink into a rare, delicious writing
trance.

It’s harder to achieve flow now
that I work regular hours in a professional office, manage a small staff, and
have tons of emails to address, along with IM’s, meetings and office drop-ins —
few of which have anything to do with the writing projects that pepper my extensive
to-do list.

And then there is the
pressure of the public nature of my work. It’s easy to get writer’s block when
I know my writing will be posted online or printed in a magazine or brochure with
a circulation of 50,000. The readers themselves don’t make it easy, either. I’m
writing for an audience of very smart, very critical faculty, administrators,
alumni, parents, students and, gulp, teenagers. Sure, the stakes make my
writing better, but they also tend to make me second-guess myself at nearly
every turn. Yet when I look back over my professional portfolio, I see that I
have, despite these obstacles, managed to achieve flow. The examples are many:
the speech the president praised, the web story that garnered some great web
traffic, the profile that a faculty member barely edited – these are the
outcomes that benefit Bucknell and satisfy the writer in my heart.

So how do I get there? Here
are a few strategies I use:

1) Define a goal.

Sometimes I receive a
request for a writing project with no guidelines other than “This person needs
to speak for 10 minutes” or “We need a blurb about Bucknell.” No pressure! If I
find myself filling space with fluff or clichés, I take that as a signal that I
have work to do before I write. I consider the needs of the speaker and the
audience: What do they need to know about? What do they want to know about? Are there behaviors or actions I want to
inspire? I consider, too, the context: Are there ties with historic or current
events? Are there recurring themes that I can expand upon or present in a new
light?

This kind of pre-writing
work happens, for instance, with the faculty stories my team and I produce. We
can’t produce a compelling story or effectively convey a main point by smooshing
every topic from a 45-minute interview into 400 words. Instead, we think more
abstractly about how some or all of those topics relate to each other. Did the
interviewee’s body language and tempo reveal a particular passion? What aspects
of their work relate to what prospective students and parents want to know
during their college search? Are there any hot topics in the media that align
with this person’s scholarship or teaching? Is there an emotional component to
the work? A humorous one?

To keep my writing sharp, I have
to do much more than write: I must stay abreast of issues in higher education
and admissions; keep up with University news and faculty and student
achievements; attend events and lectures and luncheons; get to know students;
and learn about Bucknell’s history and strategic plans for the future. Flow
doesn’t come from nothing — achieving it requires not only “mind work” but also
the background work, legwork and mindfulness of continual research.

2) Mind map.

Once I have a clear
objective or theme, I often sketch out a mind map to build an outline and
argument. I’ve used software, but right now I like paper and pen. I put my
central idea in the middle, write supporting ideas at the end of the spider’s
arms, and fill in the details from there. Sometimes the entire structure of a
piece materializes right there on the map. Then all that’s left to do is flesh out
the piece.

3) Develop rituals.

I have a routine that works
much like having a bedtime ritual did for me as a kid. It gets me in the right
frame of mind to concentrate. Since I’ve become leery of ingesting too much
purple food coloring, I’ve replaced grape Gatorade with Irish breakfast tea,
and I now prefer silence to the Talking Heads. When I’ve got a big writing
project to attack, I clean off my desk, organize, then shut off my email and
IM, brew a big cup of tea and close my office door.

I have also experimented
with writing at different times of the day. Alas, I get revved up at about 3:45
in the afternoon, much too close to quitting time. Weirdly, my best editing and
rewriting time is before 7 a.m. I hate mornings, but when there’s a messy draft
in need of help, that’s when I have to do it.

4) Do yoga.

Yoga really helps me concentrate,
even if a day or two has elapsed since my last session. Writing flow and a good
savasana feel nearly identical to me, and even a few ujjayi breaths and a
couple of downward-facing dogs help get the juices flowing.

5) Relocate.

Sometimes a change in
scenery or atmosphere is the key to the click. I sit in the comfy chair in the
corner of my office, go to 7th St. Café or Cherry Alley, or take a walk around
campus and chat with a few people to see if that frees up the words. A hot
shower steams the words loose from my brain when I’m really struggling with a
project.

6) When all else fails, deconstruct and reconstruct.

I save this approach for
really high-stakes or complex projects that aren’t cooperating because a) it’s
a lot of work and b) my coworkers tend to think I’ve lost it if they see me
doing this: I print the thing out and then slice it to bits – with a real
scissors. I spread the pieces out on my office floor and rearrange them,
categorize them with different colors of highlighters and Sharpies (A, B, C,
etc.) and toss out some of the slips. I refer to the remaining slips to revise
the digital draft, add new text to fill in the gaps the process has revealed,
and line edit from there. This opposite-of-flow approach is a dramatic way to kill
my darlings and develop a draft that doesn’t make me cringe, but when all else
fails, it works.

Molly
O'Brien-Foelsch M'98 is Director of University Marketing & Web Content
within Bucknell's Division of Communications. She has worked at Bucknell for
more than 11 years and has experience in writing admissions recruitment
materials across media, presidential remarks, video storyboards, faculty
stories, grant proposals, and other written pieces that communicate the
value of a Bucknell education across audiences. She holds a master's degree in
English from Bucknell and her bachelor's degree in English from Cedar Crest
College. She lives in Milton, Pa., with her husband, Brian, their rescued
German shepherd mix, Greta, and two cats. See her portfolio here (you may have to copy and paste, sorry!):

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